Predrive: After Technology

Collaborative Installation with Jessica Ciocci for “Predrive: After Technology” at the Mattress Factory
Pittsburgh, PA, 2008

Google Doesn’t Have All The Answers
HD video loop
2008

(lo-res excerpt)

“PREDRIVE: After Technology is an exhibition that revels in the contradictions posed by digital art. Suspicious of any kind of technological sublime, PREDRIVE aims to expose contemporary art’s fetishization of new technologies – an impulse to give digital art a mystical authority. Under the conditions of technology—ideas of attention, memory, and consciousness have been thought to transform or extend themselves through mechanical, electronic or digital portals. In attempting to map out an aesthetic of the technological sublime, contemporary artists and critics alike, have been seduced by the economy of information that computer-generated art has produced. However, what this produces—at the level of the interface— is an underwhelming, less interesting version of modernist abstraction (from Mondrian to Diebenkorn).

In contrast, the six international artists in PREDRIVE: After Technology—Jacob and Jessica Ciocci (of Paper Rad), Takeshi Murata, Antoine Catala, Gretchen Skogerson, and Brody Condon—present viewers with an enormous amount of information in a matter-of-fact, often lo-resolution frame. All six artists, in some form, explore the barrage of mediated materials presented to us as they are filtered through a host of both old and new technologies. HD video is assaulted by Lo-Res television; the din of speakers found on the street sullies state-of-the-art audio.

In a sense, PREDRIVE, presents a genealogy of the historical debates that have queried the effect new technologies have had on perception, information, and more object-based practices within the museum context. PREDRIVE: After Technology not only traces the move that digital art has provoked from object to process, but exposes the menageries of time-based art by emphasizing its material lineage from the tricks of stop-motion animation to the transparent 3-D environments of 90s gaming culture.”